| What Remains to be Seen? The Rhetoric of Witnessing
Morris’s Fog documents further written recollections published by McNamara over the last fifteen years that try to account for the unprecedented violence that has occurred since the First World War. Titles such as Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Killing and Catastrophe; In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons Of Vietnam; and Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedycertainly indicate a keen historical focus, but also McNamara’s personal commitment to persuading others about the perils of the future threatened by the remains of the past. Initially, McNamara’s writing provides a corrective for the political misjudgments influenced by the predominance of a Cold War perspective. This motivation for critique, however, is haunted by a more looming threat than just cautionary advice about the limits of perspective. The Cold War grounded in nuclear build-up is the advent of conflict haunted by a decisive possibility that would end politics, the polis, and perhaps the world. The optimism evident in post-World War hope for a “war that would end all wars” has ironically been resignified. McNamara’s writing is haunted by the possibility of a “war that would end all wars,” because he witnessed this possibility. If war indeed fogs and confuses judgment, his purpose is to show that the competitive logic of war always points toward an imperative guided by a nuclear logic.A rhetoric of responsibility that thematizes McNamara’s written work also orients the lessons in Morris’s film. Responsibility as an evaluative duty is evident near the film’s end, when McNamara turns to the poetry of T.S. Eliot to grasp the force of his need to recollect, to witness his past.“We shall not cease from exploring
And at the end of our exploration
We will return to where we started
And know this place for the first time“[1]McNamara’s citation from the Four Quartets–which does not conceive of and so defends against the prospect of a radical end, such as nuclear annihilation–indicates the conventional sense of responsibility as the duty to explore ceaselessly, but the responsibility of exploration has a reactive energy of recollection that is divided. McNamara’s recollections have a retrogressive, circular movement projected backward that returns in memory, gathering the remains to return to a momentary place anew. In “knowing this place for the first time,” he must return, recollect, and clear the fog that has confused him and so many others of his generation. Yet the desire to step out of the fog and gain the proximity that would provide clarity to some beginning is threatened by the same opacity that he wants to lighten. To begin again at a place with full knowing may be nothing more than naïve nostalgia for a purified point of origin.And yet, in nearly every way, Morris’s McNamara is a confident evaluator, assured of his interpretive decision to “return to where we started” historically. The documentary begins with a montage of post-World War/Cold War images that ends with a shot of McNamara during his service as Secretary of Defense preparing for a television press conference and questioning the television crews, “are you ready? All set?” Morris draws attention to the equivocal nature of origin as well as to the equivocal authority McNamara has over the archive with an opening interchange that seems to build a clever transition from the press conference decades ago to the present filming. At the beginning of Fog, McNamara prepares himself for the interview by asking the filmmaker to speak in a practiced tone so he could clearly hear the questions. After practicing voice levels, McNamara states authoritatively and efficiently that he does not need to “go back”:”Now I remember exactly the sentence I left off on. I remember how it started, and I was cut off in the middle. But you can fix it up someway. I don’t want to go back, introduce the sentence, because I know exactly what I wanted to say.”
Just as we know that this film is constructed by editing, we see and hear McNamara directing some of the editing. The decision to begin the film with a seemingly incidental matter is more than just clever. McNamara’s comments introduced us to a very precise and efficient man who knows exactly what he “want[s] to say.” Such certainty is not just momentary; McNamara has to some extent a very clear evaluation of the fog that has clouded the twentieth century. His desire to convey a precise viewpoint is clear in Morris’s documentary, and is also evident in his written work, which is as clear, efficient, and logical as fine technical writing.
This desire for efficiency is exemplified in recollections that produce what Kenneth Burke calls an “analysis of analysis” (Burke 9). On topics ranging from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Vietnam war, McNamara is insistent that the fog of the Cold War concealed, for good or for ill, underlying cultural, political, and moral principles that could have resulted in political negotiation that may have minimized the needless killing and massive destruction suffered over the second half of the twentieth century. In many ways his judgment that historical myopia guided U.S. foreign policy seems generally correct, and his support of this evaluation is compelling. The lessons Morris culls from McNamara’s testimony are most forceful when the filmmaker highlights the United States’ sense of its worldwide destiny and, thus, of global responsibility, a state that was often motivated by political imperialism.
McNamara’s keen analysis of an ideological paradigm that underwrote all decisions for many decades is understood more subtly as a “terminal incapacity” (7). Kenneth Burke argues that terminal incapacity occurs when one’s very abilities function as blindness (7). The resolution to fight the threat of the Triple Axis in World War II reinforces the resolve to battle a new enemy–worldwide communism. Thereafter, the U.S. response to the threat of the spread of communism becomes programmatic, and the U.S. cannot envision subtle social, cultural, and political problems that might open a different perspective on its dreaded responsibility. The U.S. ability to fight communism produced a resolve to do so that finally blinded or incapacitated the U.S.’s ability to evaluate its anti-communist goals and the means with which it secured them. In the end, McNamara provides the viewer with a cautionary critique, lessons that clarify the past and help envision the future.
And yet, he still mourns.
We don’t want to dismiss entirely the use of personal evaluation, the wisdom of an elder statesman recollecting his political life as a testimony for the future. The future is customarily presumed to be a reconstitution of the past. Yet, there remains a sense of responsibility that binds McNamara. In one sense, he cites an evaluative efficiency that binds his responsibility, and yet he remains bound by another responsibility that provokes him beyond reason. McNamara’s ongoing lessons about responsibility are haunted by a summons to which he often responds with trembling. What he has seen is threatened further by what he has not seen–indeed, by what he has seen he has not seen, what he would give us to see. McNamara never saw the faces of the hundred thousand Japanese civilians killed by a firestorm during the World War II bombings in Japan. What he did see–the singular spectacle of Quaker Norman Morrison, his body ablaze in protest–brings him to interiorize in mourning the faceless thousands incinerated in Japan, Vietnam, and many _____ elsewhere yet to come. Franklin is the spectacle that actualizes “the truth of the mourning of the other…who always speaks in me before me” (Derrida, Mémoires 29). McNamara’s recollections in the film are another attempt to bring clarity to a call that haunts him, to evoke the unseen faces that might authorize the summons. Further, his persistence in re-facing his former enemies–Castro’s face, the faces of Vietnamese leaders, and the faces of others–shows McNamara’s need to personify and endow with a sense of presence, clarity, and authority a summons that resists location. In the end, we believe that McNamara’s exhortations summon these specters for the viewer, so that we might also see and feel–in the absence of the face of the other, of the other others whose ashes cover the face of the world–the grave responsibility that remains.
Faced with McNamara’s lessons of hope for empathy and renewed rationality, the viewer is also challenged by a kind of physical pressure. We are not offering detail in place of argument when we point out that the viewer cannot overlook Robert McNamara’s presence in the film: his face, his voice, and his eyes. His direct, pervasive presence is not solely a matter of Morris’s Interrotron.[2] In Fog, McNamara seems almost to enter our space. His urgent tone and direct gestures seem to project forward, penetrating the film’s virtual space to assure us of his counsel. This guidance is expressed in a proud voice that wavers somewhere between warning and remorse. Quite starkly, Morris’s most pressing close-ups encounter McNamara’s eyes fogged with a watery kind of melancholy filled by the confusion of responsibility. We cannot look past his eyes tinged with remorse, betrayed by his most powerful personal talent: the force of analytical reason. Foremost, we cannot look past his eyes because his mourning of reason strains to perceive another form that can account for experiences that exceed his understanding. He, or Morris, wants us to see him seeing (at) those limits.
In mourning, we turn to the profound writing of Jacques Derrida because no other thinker has shown us with so much insight and patience the importance of mourning what is to come: the crisis of the future. Derrida remains the great thinker of the future, a future that is an absolute threat.
Ceaseless Mourning: What Remains to Be Thought
War, ultimately from the Indo-European wers-, to confuse, mix up.
–Adapted from The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (77)
Haunted by the spectralizing effects of the remains, McNamara’s answers to the questions Morris poses offer themselves to be read in a certain way[3]–that is, as scenes, acts, and gestures in an incomplete, indeed an incompletable, work of mourning.
No doubt McNamara entertains no such intent. From the beginning to the end of the interview, McNamara directs his discussions and arguments toward the absolute urgency of certain “lessons.” These are not the eleven often deeply ironic lessons Morris uses to punctuate his film, but ten nation-guiding principles McNamara has formulated in the explicit hope of refocusing present and future American military and foreign policy. Although Morris does not include them in his film (he appends them in a “special feature” to The Fog of War‘s DVD release), they inform all McNamara’s discussions. Indeed, the imperative to which McNamara’s principles attempt to answer constitutes the horizon of his sense of the nation’s collective responsibility to itself and to the world. Over and over, then, McNamara’s responses to Morris underscore the central–the nuclear–imperative to which he testifies: America in particular, the world more generally, must reduce the threat of nuclear war and the frequency and virulence of conventional war in the twenty-first century.
This imperative–with its psychological urgency on the one hand, its force of moral necessity on the other–imposes a ceaseless work of mourning that provokes the subject to yet further mourning rather than aiding the subject to bring grief to an end. The reason is that a certain irremediable loss, a loss itself lost to understanding, permeates McNamara’s pedagogical aims and opens his discourse to what might be called the lesson of his lessons. This lesson of the lessons, a lesson, therefore, without lesson, is that there is something utterly unlearnable about war from war, something unlearnable about human fallibility. This unlearnability poses deep problems for individual and collective responsibility in the realm of political decisions, and it is a something that cannot be broached except by way of a mourning that does not end.
1.1 The Lesson of the Lessons, the Lessons without Lesson
“My rule is, try to learn, try to understand . . . develop the lessons and try to pass them on.”
–McNamara, The Fog of War.
“One has to think and never be sure of thinking.”
–Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (145).
Morris organizes The Fog of War around a series of eleven aphoristic “lessons” which he draws from McNamara’s own words, often quoting him directly. A close inspection of these lessons indicates the dramatic irony of their central contradiction: a heightened consciousness is necessary and yet insufficient for learning what must be learned from war–from thinking about war and from thinking about thinking about war.[4] A similar inspection of McNamara’s own lessons–which are much less gnomically conceived principles than Morris’s, and which arise out of McNamara’s experiences in the Pentagon, out of his deep apprehensions about nuclear armaments, and out of his judgment that it is absolutely necessary to reduce “the brutality of war,” “the level of killing,” and the threat of terrorism–shows that they, too, are essentially contradictory. One of their greatest ironies derives from the way they specify incompatible goals–above all the contradictory goal of maintaining the sovereignty of the United States on the one hand and an imaginary sovereignty of a universal political entity to come–“the human race” or “society as a whole”–on the other.[5]
If both sets of lessons are similar in being contradictory, even if they are contradictory in dissimilar ways, they are also both offered as “lessons,” a term Morris and McNamara alike employ uncritically. Morris and McNamara each thematizes his pedagogical aims but not the value of the presumptive value of those aims–in other words, not the possible lessons that might be drawn from attempting to draw lessons from war. What, then, does the word lesson disclose about the meaning and force of McNamara’s and Morris’s lessons? More importantly, what does the word lesson disclose about the points of view and assumptions this term conceals?
According to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, the word lesson derives from a stem, leg-, to collect “with derivates meaning to speak’” (35). According to Shipley, it means to “gather, set in order; consider, choose; then read, speak” (209). This root has given rise to the Greek stems legein, to gather, speak, and logos, speech, word, reason. The two are the source of, among their English derivatives, lexicon, dialect, logic, and logistics as well as of apology. In its descent through the Latin, legere, to gather, choose, pluck, read, leg– has generated such terms as legend, legible, legion, collect, and intelligent, as well as sortilege, neglect, and sacrilege. Possibly through the Latin lex, law, it has eventuated in legal, legitimate, loyal, legislator, and privilege; and possibly through legare, to dispute, commission, charge, it has produced allege and legacy.
More directly than many words, “lesson” inherits an overdetermined range of connotation and denotation. Bearing above all the metaphysical legacy of the logos, the word “lesson” capitalizes on those intellectual traditions in which knowledge is conceived as a potentially transcendental force, a life-protecting force, which provides humans a means of surviving their violence. The word “lesson,” then, functions symptomatically as a wish-fulfillment and thus as an expression of the anxiety the wish-fulfillment would relieve. Would that there were or could be lessons from war. If such lessons are possible, then such knowledge might enable humans to reduce their dependence on war. If such lessons are not possible, then advances in techno-scientific knowledge–and the annihilative military and terrorist purposes to which such knowledge is predicted to be put–are likely to be apocalyptic.
McNamara is explicit about his fear. It is the theme of all of his remarks. In the section of the documentary that proceeds under the title “Rationality Will Not Save Us,” McNamara attributes the avoidance, to date, of nuclear holocaust to sheer “luck!” He warns: “That danger exists today, the danger of total destruction of one’s society.” He attempts to formalize this warning in his second and deeply paradoxical lesson concerning the unpredictable consequences of the “human fallibility”: “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.” Morris reduces this observation to a caution about the limits of rationality. Thus, whereas Morris stipulates the limits of a rationality that, by itself, “will not save us,” and holds open the possibility that something other than or in addition to rationality might, McNamara declares that a destruction beyond all remediation “will” happen for reasons of a “fallibility” that is inherent in if not constitutive of humanness in general, not just of particular (rational) modes or forms of human thought. In his tenth lesson, then, McNamara invokes not only the specter of the nuclear terrorism that threatens “nations”–nations in general, all nations, the identifying names of which become irrelevant in relation to the nuclear annihilation that would destroy the archive of names along with nations–but also the fact of American responsibility for contributing to this peril: “One of the greatest dangers we face today is the risk that terrorists will obtain access to weapons of mass destruction as a result of the breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Regime. We in the U.S. are contributing to that breakdown.” In these two lessons, then, McNamara specifies the apotropaic meaning of his use of the word “lesson,” which marks the apocalyptic tone of his entire discourse, of his entire testimony.
McNamara twice identifies the uncanny source of his fear, and thus of what will have been his future testimony before Morris’s camera. The first revelation occurs in his dispassionate observation that “there will be no learning period with nuclear weapons.” The second occurs when he reports on his visit to Cuba in 1992 and his highly emotional confrontation with Castro over the missile crisis thirty years earlier. He recalls that he learned for the first time that “162 nuclear warheads, including 90 tactical warheads, were on the island at the time of this critical moment of the crisis.” He is flabbergasted: “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and Castro got very angry with me because I said, ‘Mr. President, let’s stop this meeting. This is totally new to me. I’m not sure I got the translation right.’” But the meeting proceeded, and McNamara recalls having asked Castro three questions the answers to which instantly excite in him a simultaneous disbelief in and yet utterly appalled acceptance of what he is hearing:
Mr. President, I have three questions to you. Number one: did you know the nuclear weapons were there? Number two: if you did, would you have recommended to Khrushchev in the face of a U.S. attack that he use them? Number three: if he had used them, what would have happened to Cuba?
Castro answers yes to the first question. To the second, Castro answers no, not would have but did: “I would not have recommended to Khrushchev, I did recommend to Khrushchev that they be used.” And to McNamara’s third question, Castro evidently replies that Cuba “would have been totally destroyed” and then adds: “Mr. McNamara, if you and President Kennedy had been in a similar situation, that’s what you would have done.” Although McNamara repudiates Castro’s assertion, his emotion in remembering the exchange as well as during the encounter itself suggest that he now knows Castro could be right. In the moment he hears Castro’s third answer, McNamara is beside himself–literally so, for he is borne away by a dread that makes him tremble in the knowledge not only that he is learning something he had not known during the missile crisis, but something he had not known he had not known about the mindset of his opponent and of himself. He now knows that his double ignorance could have led to a nuclear confrontation.
In other words, in the moment of gaining access to his abyssal self-ignorance, McNamara is forced to see his past blindness. At that moment he envisions the unimaginable–an apocalyptic future that was avoided not by insight or foresight but by blind luck. More generally, he is on the verge of glimpsing the possibility of a present and future blindness that could not be revealed as such until afterward. If he knows that “it’s almost impossible for our people today to put themselves back into that period,” then he must suspect the terrible consequence: it will be “almost impossible” for “our people today” to learn from “that period.” Therefore, when, near the beginning of the film, McNamara says that “at 85, I can look back,” he is not necessarily claiming a specular privilege but confessing, rather, the spectacular structural sightlessness that attaches to every experience of oneself in the present. “We all make mistakes,” McNamara says near the end of the film. What prevents this assertion from being a pious cliché is that McNamara not only knows that “our understanding, our judgment, is inadequate,” but suspects that such knowledge about the fragility and incompleteness of knowledge comes only in hindsight, only belatedly, which is to say always too late.
However, whether or not he grasps it, the lesson of his lessons is that he could not deduce, invent, or otherwise recognize the specific lessons during the experiences which only in retrospect produce them. The lesson of the lessons is not in their content. The essential feature of each of the lessons is not the lesson itself. Rather, the lesson of the lessons is that they are without lesson: they do not summarize a formalizable knowledge that can be taught, learned, transmitted. The lessons are untimely, and the lesson of these lessons is that they can never present themselves as such precisely when they are most needed. Or, rather, the lesson of McNamara’s lessons is that he has intuited something about the nature of knowing, especially in times of crisis when unprecedented events unfold in unprecedented ways such that one must reckon with what exceeds present categories of comprehension, decision, action, and anticipatable consequence, putting one in the position of having to invent on the spot new means of responding to the danger at hand.
McNamara’s earlier understanding of this intractable double bind demonstrates how difficult it is to escape the effects of this bind at the very moment of recognizing it. A third of the way through the film, a younger McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, admits: “There’s much I don’t know I don’t know.” Affirming the logical necessity of this proposition, he laughs awkwardly, unable to confront its emotional force, its affective power, which will overtake him years later as one signal of what yet remains to haunt him. Years before he will have been haunted, the Secretary of Defense does not grasp the import of his insight as an index of the inescapable possibility that every present self-declaration can be caught up in a dramatic irony to which the speaker is blind. Not simply blindness, then, and not even blindness to one’s blindness, but the possibility of being blind and the unavailability of a means for determining whether or not one really is–it is this condition of possibly inevitable self-ignorance that constitutes the nuclear core of the terrible fallibility to which McNamara bears witness. In testifying to the need to learn something from the history of war in the twentieth-century and from the prospective nuclear eventuality he fears is inevitable, he testifies to the failure of his testimony and acts out the second-order cognitive fallibility that is an inescapable feature of this very testimony.
In other words, McNamara’s lessons are literally irresponsible–that is, non-responsive to the realities they would negotiate–for a reason that is structural to human consciousness and is not merely the consequence of a faulty or self-protecting memory. McNamara does not quite deduce this consequence. At the end of the film, however, he acts it out in a performative declaration that gives the lie not to the specific substance of his lessons but to their meta-level efficacy, to their ability to be sent and received as lessons. In the film’s epilogue, he balks at talking further about his responsibilities concerning the Vietnam War: “You don’t know what I know,” he says. He is talking specifically “about how inflammatory my words can be.” And yet his statement has an immeasurably greater pertinence, for the problem of the kinds of lessons to which McNamara would testify is that any such lesson requires knowing what one does not know one does not know, and a willingness to open oneself to the prospect of having to engage in an impossible act of self-recognition, a self-remarking that gives and withdraws the very possibility of witnessing.
1.2 The Necessity and Impossibility of Witnessing
“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
–Donald Rumsfeld, DOD news briefing, 12 February 2002.
1.21 Epistemological Asymmetry
There is a fundamental difference between the consciousness of self and the consciousness of other. It appears that each person has a direct, immediate, and privileged access to part of his or her own mind that is denied to others, who for their part have only an indirect and mediated access to anyone else’s “first-person” mental state. A person seems to be able to know his or her own mind by an act of self-reflection. “The certitude of inner existence, Husserl thinks, has no need to be signified. It is immediately present to itself. It is living consciousness” (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena 43). But no such act of self-reflection will enable an individual to know the mind of the other in the same way. The result is an epistemological asymmetry between what an I can know of itself and what the same I can know of another. This asymmetry is built into the very structure of consciousness, and it blocks each and every I from knowing others or being known by them in the way that this I knows–or thinks it knows–itself.
People tend to experience the asymmetry narcissistically–that is, as the richness of their own consciousness of themselves as opposed to the much poorer knowledge others seem to have of them. Who would trade the consciousness they have of themselves for the consciousness others have of them?
However, the certainty attaching to the experience of one’s own self-consciousness, a certainty in which Descartes sought a foundation for knowledge, may always be less accurate, less reliable, less truthful than the knowledge others have of oneself. One reason for this derives from the tautological nature of knowing or believing something to be the case. If a person holds a belief, he or she cannot simultaneously believe that this belief is in error. If an I knows or thinks it knows something to be the case, this I cannot simultaneously know in the present moment that it is mistaken, if it is. The grammatical (present) tense of this tautology is not accidental: anyone can, in principle, come to recognize that a belief they had previously affirmed is false, that they can have held a mistaken belief. However, at the moment, the person cannot simultaneously believe that the belief is true. A person can believe (or think he or she believes) or not; but this person cannot both believe and not believe what he or she believes.
And yet others might very well recognize that I am in error, if I am, in believing what I (think I) believe. What is more, others might also be in a position to recognize not only that, because I believe what I believe, I do not and cannot presently experience the falsity of my belief (under the circumstances, once again, that I am, in fact, harboring a false belief). This means that others are able, in principle, to occupy an epistemological position that remains out of reach for me: others can know that I am wrong; they can know that I do not know that I am wrong; they can know that I do not know that they (or someone else) might know what I do not; and they can know that I am not merely wrong, and not merely unaware of my ignorance, but unaware of my unawareness of my ignorance, and so on, at the very moment that I am convinced that I know what I (think I) know.
Under these circumstances, it would behoove me to bracket my (false) consciousness of myself, my mistaken belief, and to become as open as possible to the other’s consciousness of my error–indeed, for the other’s awareness of my unawareness of my unawareness.
And yet such an attitude remains difficult to achieve, especially when my emotional state reinforces my sense of knowing what I know. The experience of being impassioned–angry, for example–very often heightens the (potentially illusory) sense of certitude attaching to my experience of my own beliefs, my own knowledge, especially when the object of that knowledge is someone with whom I am angry. To be sure, it is possible to recognize the possibility that my emotional state is affecting my perceptions; it is even possible to count to ten before responding. Both possibilities, however, affirm the commonplace experience that the feeling of anger often intensifies the certitude with which one (thinks one) knows something to be the case.
The experience of knowing or seeming to know what one knows inscribes human consciousness within an untranscendable horizon; at the same time, however, it programs human consciousness–at least that form of consciousness that has developed from the tradition of western metaphysics–to experience its inscription not as a confinement within an unsurpassable limit but as a freedom that offers precisely the promise of transcendence in the form of access to truth itself.
Derrida generalizes this irony in Of Grammatology when he summarizes the phenomenological experience of “hearing oneself think.” Consciousness, especially in its form as conscience, he notes, seems to occur as an unmediated self-voicing in which one’s thought is available to oneself as a signified that is seemingly independent of any signifier, and that therefore has a completely non-material being, a non-material presence to the subject that hears itself thinking. “This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many–since it is the condition of the very idea of truth. . . . This illusion is the history of truth” (20). The history of truth is the history of the attempt to recuperate the knowledge of self as superior to the other’s (potential) knowledge of the self’s (potentially abyssal) self-ignorance. For this reason the truth of the truth–the truth that the experience of truth derives from an illusory experience of seeming self-presence–cannot be introjected, cannot become the non-illusory basis of the experience of one’s self-consciousness.
The reason is evident in the paradox, notoriously remarked by Donald Rumsfeld, that one can know that there are “unknown unknowns” but, by definition, not know what they are. Here, Rumsfeld can represent the world, including his enemies. He can represent his representations of himself. What is more, he can represent his self-representations as limited, partial, possibly erroneous or self-deluding. He can even represent the possibility that he might not know something, not know that he does not know it, and thus not be able to represent the limit that cuts, divides, or separates him from the very knowledge he thinks he has. What Rumsfeld intuits, in short, is that insofar as the object of knowing is subject to an indeterminate future falsifiability, self-consciousness is a source of radical epistemological provisionality. Indeed, it is a source of epistemological self-impoverishment. The catastrophe of self-consciousness is not its capacity for an infinitely regressive series of self-inclusive self-representations but its irreparable incapacity for representing the error of its representations (if and when they can be determined to be in error), except belatedly.
What turns the screw of catastrophe ever tighter is the further paradox that each of us can have, in principle, more accurate beliefs about the beliefs of others than those around us, who can also have more accurate beliefs about our beliefs than we can. These two asymmetries do not balance or cancel each other out but double and redouble each other ad infinitum. They mark and remark a rationally determinable structural boundary to rationality, a limit condition that can be specified from one side, as it were, but not from the other–the one side emerging only when the I foregoes its presumptive privilege of attesting to itself, to its knowledge of itself.
1.22 Declining to Witness
At the same time, in specifying its knowledge of the other, the I can never entirely separate itself from a minimal assertion about what it (thinks it) knows of itself. The I that knows that the other does not know its error is an I that is always in the position of knowing (or thinking that it knows) that it knows. In other words, the predication “I know” means “(I think) I know that I know,” and for this reason the I cannot assume the position of the other; that is, the I cannot become the other who knows what it (some I) does not know it does not know of itself. Only another other, an other that does not say “I,” an other that cannot say “I,” an other that is therefore not simply another human subject able to speak in the first person–only this other other could know what any human subject, appearing to speak to or for or from itself, cannot know and cannot know it cannot know. If bearing witness presupposes a first-person predication, then this other other can never bear witness to my false beliefs. Its meta-level knowledge would not be recuperable as a form of self-consciousness. This other other is not a you that says “I.” In not being able to say “I”–and thus in not being able to say “I see,” “I know that you do not know,” “I recognize that you do not recognize that you do not know,” and so on–this other other could witness what no I can witness of itself or any other I, what, in fact, no one who ever says “I” can witness.
Consciousness is a disaster, then, precisely insofar as it precipitates each I into a position of thinking it knows, precisely insofar as it cuts each I off from the possibility of speaking without saying “I,” without embedding its knowledge and its representations of its knowledge in a self-referential, hence self-interested, frame.
This is a secret that consciousness keeps from itself within itself, even when it reveals this secret to itself: I can never know, until some future moment, whether or not my present beliefs are in the name of a value other than self-interest–for example, the value of a truth that would not participate in the illusory experience of self-certainty. I can never make that future moment come to pass. I can never make it arrive. I can never say: “Now, at last, I know. Now I finally know that I know.”[6]
1.23 Deciding–For and Against
On this count, how should McNamara be judged? As Alexander Cockburn shows, throughout the interviews McNamara misremembers and occludes the historical record, construes his behavior in self-serving ways, and otherwise inauthenticates himself. If one were to bracket McNamara’s personal fallibility, however, there would remain the problem of an impersonal fallibility within the very structure of knowing and acting. This fallibility takes the form of unforeseen or unintended consequences, of unwanted outcomes, of results that those who initiate a course of events might be the first to repudiate on moral or ethical grounds–in other words, of developments for which no one r can take responsibility. “Do you feel in any way responsible for the [Vietnam] war? Do you feel guilty?” Morris asks. McNamara answers: “I don’t want to say any more.”[7] One might wish to condemn McNamara for his evasions–indeed, for his evasion of his evasions–especially on the matter of America’s invasion in Southeast Asia. And yet it is also possible that McNamara cuts off the exchange precisely because responsibility can never be a matter of a sorrowful, rueful, or otherwise mournful subject coming to accept a determinable responsibility that originates in this person’s decisions and actions. It is possible, then, that McNamara does not want to answer Morris because he has caught a glimpse of a responsibilit–yan impossible, unforgivable responsibility–to which he does not know how to respond, and for which he does not know whether or not it would be possible to know what his responsibilities would be.
Responsibility requires decision, and decision entails not just lost opportunities but infinite opportunity costs. Every decision cuts off all other possible futures in order to deliver what will have been a particular future. To decide, then, is to impose a –cidal fate upon what might have been. It is to beckon toward what cannot come to pass, hence cannot die either. It is to cut off and so lose what, in not coming into being, cannot be lost as such, and thus would be a loss before and beyond loss, a death before and beyond death, a loss or a death without loss or death.
McNamara might be understood as struggling to articulate a version of this insight. “Historians don’t really like to deal with counter-factuals, with what might have been,” he declares in the film. When he then adds that, “Well, I know a few things,” he is not asserting a positive or empirical knowledge based on experience but anticipating what he shortly thereafter calls the “fog of war.” This metaphorical fog itself does not cloud judgment but rather foregrounds what does–namely, the beclouded and beclouding nature of all judgment with respect to the futures that are decided against, consciously or not, in coming to any decision. That is why he ruminates on his guilt not so much for a decision he made as for a corporate decision which blocks any simple attribution or acceptance of blame: “in order to win a war, should you kill 100,000 people in one night by firebombing or any other way?” he asks, having recalled his part in the military “mechanism that in a sense recommended” just such a decision–namely, “killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs.” When McNamara invokes the “mechanism” of decision-making, he admits that the decision in question must–absolutely must–be faulted, but he em also recognizes it is an empty gesture to take the burden of fault on himself no matter how much others might want him to or even how much he might want to: “LeMay said, If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.” McNamara knows that the “fog” of war–the “fog” that renders responsibility impossibly irresponsible–is not limited to war but is a feature of all decision: “Our understanding, our judgment, is inadequate.” If his pronouncement is bathetic, it nevertheless speaks to the terrible knowledge of what cuts him off from the we (the 100,000 dead among so many others) at the very moment he invokes a community of like minds, of the we whose understanding and judgment are in adequate.
Vis-à-vis the lost futures entailed in any decision, the inadequacy is radical. It is no wonder that McNamara would seek, in the words he loves from Eliot, to “know the place for the first time”–as if it were s possible to abide in a moment of time before the onset not only of loss but of all the losses that have been and will continue to be lost. These lost losses proceed from out of the very act of deciding, from out of the instant of decision,[8] for one never decides in the name of life alone without deciding also in the name of a nameless and incalculable deathliness. Having to decide means having to decide against life in deciding for life. War invariably makes such implication explicit. The memory of those decisions produces a ceaseless work of mourning.
1.3 Memory and Mourning
“Let me just ask the TV–are you ready?”
–Robert McNamara, The Fog of War
The therapeutic disciplines typically distinguish between normal and pathological grief in mourning. Freud, for example, contrasts melancholia with a more typical course of grieving. In melancholia, Freud says, the individual “knows whom he has lost but not what it is he has lost in them” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 166). In normal mourning, even at its most severe, however, the individual does not suffer this unknowing: “there is nothing unconscious about the loss,” and thus nothing unknowable about the source of the individual’s suffering or its psychodynamic course. The result is that “the testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object” 165-66). This withdrawal is often t exceedingly difficult. The individual must convert the representation of the loved object as living into a representation of the loved object as dead or permanently gone, as thereafter irrecoverable, as irreparably mute before the desire of the one who remains. “Each single one of the memories and hopes” by which the survivor had been libidinally invested in or “bound . . . to the object” must be “brought up and hyper-cathected” so as to “detach” this person’s libido and enable it to be redirected toward the world of the living. The grieving individual, Freud suggests, knows this quite well. And yet Freud finds himself unable to explain either “why this process of carrying out the behest of reality bit by bit . . . should be so extraordinarily painful” or why the pain should “seem natural to us” (166). Normal grief proceeds from something unknowable, a pain that, because it “seems natural,” conceals its essential mystery, its essential unknowability, its essential non-essentiality.
As has been suggested, this double, indeed abyssal unknowability permeates the very structure of consciousness, which is incapable of representing and introjecting the lost losses that are a consequence of every decision. For this reason, then, consciousness is implicated in a work of mourning that can never, in principle, bring the process of withdrawing its “cathexes” from the lost object to an end. The reason is simple: the very basis of any decision is a simultaneous psychic investment and disinvestment. Cathexis to a loved object is always a refusal to cathect to all the other possible objects. It is a non-cathexis in them, a blocking off or even blotting out of them. Cathexis itself entails a form of the very withdrawal of cathexis that Freud considers to be the mystery of grief and its pain. Cathexis to is simultaneously decathexis from: cathectic attachment to a loved object is from its onset a version of the decathexis from by which the subject is formed or constituted in a mourning without end, in the ceaseless work of mourning that attends all identifications and object choices and thereafter all decision. In Mémoires, “Dialanguages,” and elsewhere, Derrida has explained that one can never completely assimilate the dead other, who remains before and after the interiorizing movement of mourning. All the more so would the other others remain beyond cathectic or decathectic appropriation. For this reason, then, all object choice, all cathexis and its decathectic self-preservation upon the death of the object, inscribes psychic life within a structure of cutting, of -cision, the fatality of which McNamara attempts to witness.
The shared etymology of memory and mourning points to the identity of attachment and loss, love and grief. Both memory and mourning descend from a common Indo-European stem, (s)mer-, to remember. This root has given rise to the Germanic murnan, to remember sorrowfully, the origin of mourn, and to the Latin memor, mindful, the source of memory, remember, commemorate, and other cognate terms (American Heritage Dictionary 62). These etymologies suggest that memory–the “very essence of the psyche” in Freud’s model, as Derrida explains in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” 199–is inseparable from the work of mourning. If the heart of mourning is an experience of loss, then so too would be the condition of the possibility of a subject’s self-relation, of its auto-affection. Psychic life would begin with a movement of ontological subtraction. However, if the heart of mourning is not a loss that can be experienced but an incalculable loss of what will never have been–of losses that were never present to be subsequently lost, of losses that can never be recalled, of losses that are lost as losses–then the condition of the possibility of psychic life would be absolutely mournful.
Anticipating his listeners’ unbelief, the first-person subject of Errol Morris’s documentary–the person who is still moved to tears by his memory of John F. Kennedy and this President’s determination to prevent nuclear war–this person, Robert Strange McNamara, insists that he can remember the celebration in San Francisco at the end of World War I. His first memory, then, would be from as early as the age of two, and it is this: “My earliest memory is of a city exploding with joy”
Exploding in Sorrow: The Remains of the Dead
The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.
–Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology
‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
–Robert McNamara, The Fog of War
McNamara tries to access some reason that will stop the world from ceaseless mourning, but in sorrow he is haunted by the vague sense that such reason itself might be the threat he fears.Any ethical principle remains threatened by the velocity and efficiency of competition that is the essence of warfare. The lessons of war seem to arrive too late. In McNamara’s economy of decision, war demands that “one must do evil in order to produce good.” However, as Derrida reminds us, the advent of the nuclear age may introduce a new rate of speed and temporality so effective that it erases all competence in a feverish drive to dominate (“No Apocalypse, Not Now” 20). It is this unprecedented rate of speed and competition that McNamara tentatively begins to intuit as a kind of evil because implosion is its telos. As an efficiency expert, McNamara is guided by reason. He understands very clearly that nuclear weapons are efficient while his work is a plea for political and military initiatives that are essentially slow and inefficient: reasoned judgment, deliberation, negotiation, and internationalism. Few within international politics would argue with such sound judgment. And yet this sound, reasonable advice does not seem to face the threat that intuits. Perhaps the , conflict that McNamara faces is a “reason that must let itself be reasoned with” (Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason 159).
In General Curtis Lemay, McNamara faces his threatening intuitions because Lemay, like Castro, exemplifies the frightful, extremist will to accelerate the stakes of warfare to the utmost. If McNamara is troubled by the stakes of moral behavior, by criminality in war, Lemay embodies the perspective that aggression has no limit when warranted by the necessity for national self-defense. Taken to these limits, McNamara reasons, Lemay’s military strategy presents a glimpse of the evil of competitive aggression that may dominate the future. When evil takes the form of a face so ordinary and so respected, one must recognize in this face a glimpse of oneself.
Lemay personifies the logic of the nuclear age, a strategic logic that accelerates the goal driven by the desire to “prevail” over all others. The etymology of “prevail” expresses an absolutism that predominates before and beyond all else. The will to absolutism manifested when Lemay besieged Japan in a torrid firestorm, and when he argued for using nuclear weapons against Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis and, again, against the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. He justified those absolute decisions on practical grounds: if you have a powerful advantage over your enemy, you should exercise this force before it is visited on you. Thus the definition of a war criminal is a general who loses. The problem of needless killing remains a moral distinction arbitrated by the victor. Both sides must sacrifice the utmost to prevail. And the sacrifices made for victory are archived by a victor who is authorized by a morality and a spirituality underwritten by an absolute, transcendental ideal. Freedom, liberation, progress, destiny, God are some of the many proper names used to efface the confusion of needless sacrifice in warfare.
For McNamara, Lemay’s strategies of brutal, competitive force realize the apocalyptic finality of warfare once nuclear armaments proliferate throughout the world. His repeated response to the force of such hard-line military and political strategy has been a dedicated effort to persuade his witnesses to interrupt the sense of entitled “omnipotence” that disguises a dangerous sense of “vulnerability” that remains the legacy of the Cold War (Lifton 128). For him, the stakes of this legacy remain despite historical differences. In fact, his rhetorical tone has become more urgent. In the May/June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy, he argues that the Bush Administration’s policy on nuclear weapons continues and contributes to policies that have been in place for over forty years and that have “grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years” (“Apocalypse Soon” 1). Further, entitled by a sense of omnipotence, the Bush Administration has contributed to the nuclear arms conflict by failing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), suggesting that American interests remain independent of the interests of the international community. What entitles such authority? McNamara would suggest that such a perspective of a self-interested power is the effect of hard-line politics of force. As the strongest nation in the world, the US can dominate the political sphere and control world history. But we believe that McNamara increasingly senses that this reason is only part of the reason, meaning that certain reasons are not reasonable enough.
McNamara cannot quite access the forces of authority that extend Lemay’s, the Bush Administration’s, or the U.S.’s historical sense of messianic dominance. McNamara’s thinking encounters a prior, more formidable violent force that he can barely sense and that he cannot fully know. Yet in the face of Lemay and others, he is offered a glimpse of the holocaustal possibility of the messianism of American foreign policy–a future that in its drive toward finality effaces any trace of the future.
At this impasse, we believe that Derrida’s writing provides profound insight into the violent absolutism that confounds McNamara’s perspective. At this impasse, Jacques Derrida’s writing is most memorable because he has made a compelling claim about the singular force of deconstruction. Deconstruction has a singular competency in the nuclear age, for the logic of this era–total remainderless destruction–“watches over deconstruction, guiding its footsteps” (“No Apocalypse” 27). If deconstruction is anything at all, it intervenes in those decisive “events which would end any affirmative opening toward the arrival of the other” (Derrida, “The Deconstruction of Actuality” 32).
From a Derridean perspective, the nuclear age is a metonymy inscribed within the structure of ontotheological historicity that Derrida names metaphysics, the movement of an “absolute epoche” that struggles toward the revelation of finality (“No Apocalypse” 27). Derrida summarizes the movement of this particular historicity succinctly when he notes that “the very concept of history has lived only upon the possibility of meaning, upon the past, present, or promised presence of meaning and of truth (Derrida, Dissemination 184). The nuclear age is the troubling potential of the internal logics of transcendence and finality within metaphysical structures that provide complete revelation in a parousia of truth.
The holocaustal apocalypse of nuclear war would finally make present the unwitnessable truth of metaphysics: an explosion of negative transcendence that results from the political efficiency of technocratic reason, as this decision making economy ultimately prevails in an attempted capitalization of the absolute. In Derridean terms, such an unveiling would mean the event of an absolute wholly other revealed within a telos of deathward closure, which would end all mourning in a “remainderless destruction . . . completed by a nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity” (Derrida, “No Apocalypse” 27-28).
What is at issue here . . .is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence. (Derrida, Archive Fever 7)
Nuclear catastrophe would certainly risk annihilating all that is named humanity. One would not need to read Jacques Derrida’s writing to reach this stunningly obvious conclusion. Catastrophic death is surely not a horror to be passed over as an obvious simplicity. Nevertheless, Derrida’s point about annihilation directs us to a far more complicated and rewarding explanation about the metaphysical economy of the absolute–an economy infected with a trace of evil. What is this trace of evil as such?
When Derrida refers to the destruction of the archive, he writes of the violent emergence of utter evil. Such a force of evil violently opposes and destroys all others in its drive to prevail as an absolute: the “one” (78). Derrida’s writing relentlessly traces the violence of the archive he names western metaphysics, an archive that sends forth a deathliness in its efforts to enclose or transcend any trace of its constitutive other. The essence of the nuclear referent figured by the center, the core, or the basis is the effect of a burning drive to authorize, elect, dominate, and conclude. Nuclear war is the legacy of this burning fever.
As the ultimate sacrifice, nuclear war would be the event that finally reaches to award a name to the unnamable. It would be the war that would end all confusion.In confusion, McNamara is constrained by the limit of thinking: he knows but he does not quite know; and he sees but he cannot see clearly. He is haunted by the faint image of things burning, and he hears the murmur of their cries. From where do these images arrive? Are these things of the past? Are these things now? Are these things yet to come? At these threatening limits, he trembles in sorrow.
Of the specters that remain with us haunting our writing, of those that we faintly acknowledge one commands our attention: Its voice echoes: “no apocalypse, not now.” |
                                |
WHAT YET REMAINS
Every decision is a cut. Every decision is a cut that marks the incalculable decisions that could have been made, the infinite decisions that didn’t make the cut. And all of these remaindered decisions haunt the decisions that, having been made, remain. We can see, for instance, when we look back upon decisions we have made in our lives, that they are fractured by their possibilities, that they have always been fractured by the other possibilities, not only the un-chosen possibilities, but even those contingent on the un-chosen, those to which we are blind in principle. The past, we see, is actually always fractured by the future it cannot calculate.For this reason, the Derridean archive would be the repository not only of the future that will come to pass but of those futures that will not. It would include the trace of what, by virtue of the structure of decision, is without trace.
Born of their cuts. Decisions are born from cutting, by necessity.
“A witness, as such, is always blind. Witnessing substitutes narrative for perception.”
–Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 104.
BLIND TO THE CUT
A film is born of cuts, and bears its cuts, any film, a home movie, a flashy Hollywood production, a documentary film of an historic decision maker. For a celluloid strip is first cut to pieces before a film can take form: razors, scissors, cisions, and decisions enjoin in their shredding. Virtually all films are edited in a process of cutting that enables the assembling or the splicing of the cuts. The reassembly, however, does not restore but continues the violence to temporal and spatial continuity. Sergei Eisenstein–Soviet socialist filmmaker and innovator of montage–saw political possibilities in the dialectical conflict in the splice and decided to emphasize it, marking his aesthetic in the cut. At the same time, Hollywood film, prioritizing narrative structure, perfected “continuity editing,” also called “invisible editing,” editing that distracts the viewer from its constitutive cuts to render their necessary visibility “invisible.”
EVERY DECISION IS A CUT
Decisions are sometimes marked by their fatal effects, and they are always marked by their fatal origins, their need to have cut off future possibilities. “We burned to death a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in one night.” We see Robert McNamara say this three times in The Fog of War. On the third time he asks: “Was there a rule then that said you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night?” Mass killing is obviously traumatic, but it is in the syntactical stutter that McNamara marks the painful structure of decision itself.
“Blindness does not prohibit tears, it does not deprive one of them.”
–Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 127.
McNamara is a man who can cry, but, while citing this event three times, he never cries for the 100,000 Japanese civilians. Yet while we don’t quite see a mourning for those dead, we do catch a glimpse of a mourning of the decisions not made–the U.S. military could have decided, even, to “kill” the citizens of Tokyo, but it didn’t; it decided to “burn to death” the citizens of Tokyo. And McNamara marks this decision over and over. The decision to kill 50-90% of the urban population of Japan before dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was always haunted by the other possible decisions, and it remains haunted by the other possible decisions. For a decision is in ruins as soon as it is made, for it sits amidst the ashes of all the unmade decisions, all the futures sacrificed.
Shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death.
“In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin; it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.”
–Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 65.
“That’s what’s happening right now.”
“It’s too late.”
“It leaves. It leaves.”
–Derrida, Derrida
(Shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death.)
CRITICAL FLICKER FUSION
In film, the stutter becomes a flicker. Consider for a moment that the movement on a roll of film is created by interrupting a still image 24 times a second, 24 still photographs, each cut with a black bar, a non-image, images and non-images both spooled through the projector. Yet, we see a continuous, uninterrupted moving image. Humans continue to see an image for a fraction of a second after it is removed from eyesight, and this is called an “afterimage,” a trace of a trace. While we are watching our afterimage, a black bar, a lapse, a not-seen, crosses the screen. Flick, flick. Forty-eight times a second a projector’s light pulses whose luminosity we perceive as unwavering (Critical Flicker Fusion) . In the flicker is the seen and not seen, what allows for, but is not itself, seeing. This technical point exemplifies an ethical difficulty. Sight is not just partial; one’s vision is essentially irresponsible to the traces that allow for the presence of vision. There is a constitutive blindness to seeing because sight has no insight into its own blindness.
HAUNTING POSSIBILITIES
We are necessarily blind. The physiologically blind, we should notice, often reach out to ask other eyes to see in their blindness.
During his 98 bombing missions in Vietnam, former Captain Randy Floyd never once saw the Vietnamese people who died and suffered from the bombs dropped from his plane. His job was “very clean,” as he says, simply pulling the “commit switch” with the pre-programmed bomb pattern when it was time. Military performance depends upon decisiveness, upon an unwavering beam of light. More than anything the “commit switch” cleans up the messy job of decision, blinding one to the incalculable decisions that could have been made, the incalculable futures sacrificed. The job of the bombardier is the job of a blind man who thinks he can see. “During the missions, after the missions, the result of what I was doing, the result of this, this game, this, uh, exercise of my technical expertise never really dawned on me, that reality of the screams, or of the people being blown away, or of their homeland being destroyed, uh, just was not a part of what I thought about.” If he knew he were blind at the time, he would need to reach out for guidance from another, another whom he himself could not see. Someone looking up and watching a bomb fall from the sky perhaps. “When I was there, I never saw a child that got burned by napalm.”
To see a future clearly requires a blindness, a staving off of possibility. Those sacrificed possibilities can return to haunt, and they can return to haunt such that we not only are in a position to mourn the sacrifices of the past, but begin to recognize in the notion of possibility, the necessary sacrifices of the future. “But I look at my children now, and, um, I don’t know what would happen, if, uh, uh, what I would think about if someone napalmed ’em.
Randy Floyd’s children haven’t been napalmed. But they could be. In opening to his blindness, the Other he can’t see, in recognizing that there will always be Others he can’t see, Randy Floyd accesses the Other of infinite possibility. He isn’t recognizing the probability that his children could be burned to death; he is recognizing the possibility. We witness Randy Floyd’s non-witnessing. He knew what he didn’t see, a knowledge which opened the possibility of not knowing what he didn’t see. Once one begins to recognize those unseen possibilities, one is experiencing the difference that necessitates mourning. When Randy Floyd accesses this structure he doesn’t mourn the future death of his children as much as he folds that incalculable future upon a past whose structural difference he then painfully experiences. The past is always fractured by the future it cannot calculate or see.
Randy Floyd appears in the 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds. We watch his eyes as he speaks, his words forcing unthinkable images into his mind, seeing what he can’t see: Vietnamese children napalmed; his own children napalmed. We watch him cover his eyes with his hands to wipe the blurring tears. And then, on the screen, we see, cut in, what he didn’t: Vietnamese children, skin peeling off in sheets.
The documentary gives sight to a blindness, what we neglected to mourn, what we never knew to mourn, showing us that there are endless blindnesses. There is a blindness of the other in all sight. And there is a blindness within mourning that is a recognition of the other, whose death and whose presence is never fully incorporable, whose death and whose presence we are always available to, without closure. One can only mourn without promise of restoration.
“They would like to follow the gaze of the other whom they do not see,” perhaps even the Other other, the other who does not return us to ourselves” (Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind6).
WITH NO PROMISE OF RESTORATION
Documentary film has a history of bringing the unseen into view: it preserves what has passed; it travels to foreign lands; it serves as exposé; it focuses on the mundane; it represents the marginalized. But before it can serve any of those functions for viewers, it must be organized by the filmmaker(s). The film must be shredded to pieces before it is assembled into a viewing experience whose unfolding in time and space we feel to be coherent.
Many films achieve coherence by relying on overarching narrative logic that allows us to experience a series of discontinuous shots as continuous. In fact, the practice of continuity editing is one of the great hallmarks of Classic Hollywood film. Continuity editing establishes a number of editing devices that habituate the viewer to experiencing continuity where they see discontinuity. Something as simple as the shot-reverse shot technique so frequently used when filming a conversation illustrates this well: we begin with an establishing two-shot of two interlocutors; then we alternate back and forth, usually in close-up, between the two as they converse–shot-reverse shot. Our sense of narrative continuity–that two people exchange words in a conversation whose meaning and significance become increasingly clear–overrides the visual discontinuity–that the perspective hops from one spot to the next without spatial transition and that “dead time” is cut out.
“A witness, as such, is always blind. Witnessing substitutes narrative for perception.”
–Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind104.
While basic continuity style has dominated Hollywood since the early twentieth century, the Hollywood Renaissance cut into this dominance in the late 1960s, a time of worldwide revolution that included the Vietnam War. A number of American filmmakers began making experimental and culturally conscious films, many of them violent to narrative expectation. Easy Rider (Hopper 1969) and Bonnie and Clyde (Penn 1967) both famously and abruptly kill their protagonists without resolution or perhaps even significance; Catch-22 (Nichols 1970), a World War II satire produced during the Vietnam War, often denies the viewer establishing shots, splicing the viewer instead into disorienting close-ups in medias res; and M*A*S*H(Altman 1970), a Korean War satire produced during Vietnam, keeps the viewer so far from the central action that we remain unsure of its centrality. As Warren Beatty astutely observed, “Bob [Altman] had a talent for making the background come into the foreground and the foreground go into the background, which made the story a lot less linear than it actually was” (Biskind 103). In other words, American fictional film during the Vietnam War takes up a similar challenge as documentary film generally: it aims to break our habits of seeing in order to bring to sight forces already at work: discontinuity, disorientation, non-resolution, uncertainty. These films break from the logic of classical cinematic language. They are marked by their insistence that we see film in ruins, a representation that in its medium and in its structure always testifies to the violence and division of its origin.Derrida’s generalization of the ruin in Memoirs of the Blind allows us to see how a film in ruins could speak to an American culture increasingly threatened by dissent and diversity: “The ruin . . . is experience itself. . . . There is nothing of the totality that is not immediately opened, pierced, or bored through” (69). The ruin offers “no promise of restoration” (65).
BLIND SPOTS
Randy Floyd mourns “with no promise of restoration.” His own sense of totality has been opened, pierced, bored through.
Robert McNamara’s horizon, however, doesn’t reveal that choice. His life of war put him in the position of making decisions so fatal that his understandable response is to hope to provide a structure to relieve the future of seeing this repetition; he hopes to restore the future with the past.
“At my age, 85, I’m at age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on” (Morris).
He quite reasonably suggests a goal:
“Should not the nations of the world–the United States in particular–establish as their overarching foreign policy goal the reduction of fatalities from conflict within and among nations?” (McNamara, Argument 5)
To help determine the future, McNamara begins digging in the ruins to locate the “missed opportunities” of leaders and decision makers in conflict.
“I want to be absolutely clear that my primary concern is with raising the probabilities of preventing conflict in the future. The missed opportunities we examine are, we argue, due primarily to mutual misperception, misunderstanding, and misjudgment by leaders in Washington and Hanoi. We therefore ask: If each side had known the truth about the other’s reality, might the outcome have been less tragic?” (6).
“As a general rule–a most singular rule, appropriate for dissociating the eye from vision–we are all the more blind to the eye of the other the more the other shows themselves capable of sight, the more we can exchange a look or a gaze with them.”
–Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 106.
While McNamara recognizes the presence of blind spots in the past, he cannot see their structural necessity. He hopes they can be illuminated. Within his reasonable world, he has no choice but to work through probabilities. Yet statistical analysis calculates outcome while it cannot see the incalculable within all outcome, the threateningly incalculable that must be, impossibly, confronted.The future haunts: those nagging blind spots.
“The point is right away to go beyond, in one fell swoop, the first glance and thus to see there where this glance is blind, to open one’s eyes wide there where one does not see what one sees. One must see, at first sight, what does not let itself be seen. And this is invisibility itself. For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw, the error of first sight is to see, and not to notice the invisible.
–Derrida, Specters of Marx141.
McNamara’s image is already captured, divided by its future.
“Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner . . . but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names.”
–Derrida, Of Hospitality25.
As captured by Morris’s documentary, McNamara’s struggle with reason and its inadequacy to address futurity is a strikingly beautiful and painful impasse. Morris takes McNamara’s image and renders it through the hesitating fragility of a blink, that physiological reminder of the weakness of sight, that it shares itself with blindness. The de-centered composition, dropped frames, freeze frames, and oblique angles all work cinematically to take unwavering self-possession from a man still looking for the ghosts that will possess him.
“But we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a ‘self’ is never in itself or identical to itself.”
–Derrida, Mémoires28.
EYES AND TEARS
We are necessarily blind, and we reach out to ask other eyes to see in our blindness. Derrida illustrates this idea simply with the many portraits of blind men reaching forward with their hands.
In the “Deleted Scenes” from The Fog of War, McNamara cites Dylan Thomas’s poem “The Hand that Signed the Paper,” which ends:
The five kings
count the dead
but do not softenThe crusted
wound nor pat
the brow;
A hand rules pity
as a hand rules
heaven;
Hands have no
tears to flow.
The counting hand doesn’t reach forward; it stays close to the chest. Hands, here, enlist the dead in their self-enclosing and instrumental reason. They “see” the dead as a reflection of their own empire and cannot acknowledge the near-dead. But the blindness of this hand does not cause it to reach out to implore another for assistance. Blind eyes do. Or rather the hands of those with blind eyes do, for the eyes of the blind no longer service self-navigation, the seeing of oneself in place. The desire to picture oneself no longer performs through the eyes that are blind.
“The desire for self-presentation is never met, it never meets up with itself, and that is why the simulacrum takes place. Never does the eye of the Other recall this desire more sovereignly to the outside and to difference, to the law of disproportion, dissymmetry, and expropriation. And this is memory itself.”
–Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind121.
Even the non-blind find their eyes have deceived them in providing the hope of a glimpse of totality in self. Self-representational desires, especially at their strongest–for instance, in an act of self-portraiture–reveal the inadequacy of one’s own eyes to actually see oneself seeing. As Derrida write in Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, the truth of the eyes is unveiled when seeing is veiled, as through tears. For in welling up and delivering forth tears the eyes are doing something:
“It makes something happen or come, makes something come to the eyes, makes something well up in them, by producing an event. It is performative, something vision alone would be incapable of if it gave rise only to representational reporting” (122).
At the end of the book, Derrida explains of the Andrew Marvell poem “Eyes and Tears,” “between seeing and weeping, he sees between and catches a glimpse of the difference, he keeps it, looks after it in memory–and this is the veil of tears–until finally, and from or with the ‘same eyes,’ the tears see” (128-9):
Thus let your streams o'erflow your springs,Till eyes and tears be the same things:
And each the other’s difference bears;
These weeping eyes, those seeing tears.
The weeping eyes seeing are no longer a repository of (self) representations, but instead the performative locus of (self) expropriation, no longer an instrument servicing the desire for (self) enclosure. Catching a glimpse of the difference they weep, and mourn, and cry with joy.
“No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars.”
–Derrida, Specters of Marxxix.
“Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and only lives in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning which . . . refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism?”
–Derrida, Mémoires 6.
No apocalypse. Not now.
“It’s too late.”
–Derrida, Derrida.
EVERY MOMENT IS MARKED BY THE POSSIBILITY
What is threatening to us is what we cannot–in advance–know, name, or foresee. What is necessary is our opening to alterity, within us and outside us. Jacques Derrida taught us this forcefully in his lifelong project of recognizing the future as the “arrival of the totally unexpected,” a sentiment introduced early in the documentary bearing his name, Derrida. Later–or was it earlier?–in the “deleted interviews” of the film, he recognizes a “death effect” that occurs when one has one’s picture taken. Since the presence of the pro-filmic subject is not required, but recalled, as the photograph passes through time, photographing always marks an absence: “This film will survive me . . . every moment is marked by the possibility.” One gives oneself over to the monstrous future that includes one’s death.
“The desire for self-presentation is never met. . . . Never does the eye of the Other recall this desire more sovereignly to the outside and to difference, to the law of disproportion, dissymmetry, and expropriation. And this is memory itself.”
–Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 121.
Even Derrida shows reluctance. Yet he finally says, in Derrida, “at the end there was something good in allowing oneself to be surprised, in allowing other people to take what they want. It’s too late. It leaves; it leaves. That’s what’s happening right now.”
It leaves. It leaves. |
